Infectious pancreas necrosis (IPN) is one of the most infectious diseases in fish farming. AqueGen is one of the companies working on this challenge, and the first to deliver salmon roe immune to the disease. 

AquaGen produces salmon roe for aquaculture companies in Norway and abroad. Through research and systematic breeding, they ensure that each new generation of farmed salmon displays better growth and resilience to diseases, than the previous generation.

All the salmon roe in the hatcheries must be sorted. This was previously done by hand and was very time-consuming. Now, robots have been developed to carry out this job much faster. AGM Roesorter was developed in a collaboration between AquaGen and Skala Maskon, a company specializing in automation for different industries. The robot spends just one hour on a job that would previously have taken over 30 man-hours, and in doing so, making the sorting of roe considerably more efficient.

Just as for humans, vaccines have improved the lives and welfare of farmed salmon. Salmon vaccines are usually injected by hand. In other words, each salmon gets injected with a syringe containing the vaccine. This is time-consuming work. Skala Maskon has developed an automatic vaccination machine able to vaccinate 20 000 smolt in just one hour. This means that a lot of work, previously performed by workers, can now be left to the vaccination machine.

Most of the hatcheries and fry facilities built in Norway today make use of a recycling plant (RAS). The RAS facilities use much less freshwater then older facilities. In theory, more than 99 % of the water can be recycled and reused. Another advantage of RAS-facilities is that they ensure stable environmental conditions for the salmon, without using a lot of energy on heating or cooling the water.   

SalMar’s hatchery and fry facility in Gjøvika is an example of a facility that uses the RAS-technology. The facility was ready for use in January 2017 and has the capacity to produce 15-20 million smolt each year.

Sea lice is one of the biggest challenges for the marine facilities, and the industry spends billions of kroners yearly attempting to resolve it. The Hydrolicer is one of the technological solutions being used to remove sea lice. The salmon are transferred to a closed container where water is moving in a fast eddy current. This creates pressure differences, forcing the lice to detach from the salmon.

Steinsvik is a Norwegian company delivering advanced feeding systems, enabling the aquaculture companies to remotely feed several facilities at once from a centralized feeding center. SalMar has established a remote feeding center on Senja, an island in Troms. The people working here feed the salmon in all of Salmar’s facilities across Troms and Finnmark.

InnovaMar was completed in 2010, on Frøya in Trøndelag – and is one of the world’s most innovative facilities for the docking and processing of salmon. The facility has an area of 17 500 square meters, which corresponds to two and a half football courts! InnovaMar has the capacity to slaughter 150 000 tons of salmon every year. This is equivalent to about half of all the salmon that is produced in the mid-region of Norway. The facilities have many innovative and high-tech solutions, which take into account both the fish that are being processed and the humans working there. Every day, over 600 people work with the slaughtering and processing of fish, as well as the administration. 

InnovaNor is a modern fish processing plant in Senja municipality. The factory was completed at the end of 2021 and has over 300 permanent employees today.

The facility covers an area of 20,000 square meters, and it has an annual capacity to slaughter 150,000 tons of fish. The facility has its own fillet line with a capacity of 15,000 tons per year.

Inside the factory, the administration of SalMar also has its offices, together with the feed center which can remotely feed all production facilities for SalMar in Northern Norway.

Salmon farming is a young industry – and as you see on the screen, it has seen rapid development since its beginning, almost 50 years ago. There have been several challenges connected to the welfare of fish and the environmental impact of the industry which have been resolved, however, there are still other challenges requiring work and attention. These include sea lice, disease, escaping and local environmental impacts.

Good welfare of fish and the environmental status of the industry is important in itself, but these conditions are absolutely crucial for efficient production of salmon. The aquaculture industry uses a large amount of resources on constantly improving the fish health and limiting the impact on the environment.    

Navigate to the right to learn more about the aquaculture industry’s challenges and how they work to resolve them.

Sea lice is one of the biggest challenges for the aquaculture industry today. It is a small crustacean that we find naturally in the sea. It is important to the health of the wild salmon that the level of lice is kept as low as possible. Therefore, strict rules have been introduced on the permitted level of lice in the facilities. 

The sea lice do not affect the quality of the salmon or food safety, but if there are too many, they will harm the welfare of the fish. The farmers conduct weekly counts to monitor the amounts of lice on the salmon. If there are too many, the fish will need treatment. In earlier days, the treatment for sea lice was simply to use pharmaceutical methods, but nowadays, alternative methods have been developed to remove the lice. Among the alternative treatments is the use of cleaner fish that eat the lice from the salmon, and the use of hosing, making the lice fall off the fish. The main strategy, though, is through preventive measures, like the use of protective covering around the pens that stop the lice entering.

The health of the fish is of a high priority and the aquaculture industry uses various methods to prevent disease. Vaccination and good hygiene routines, alongside the breeding of robust salmon, are the most important measures. The location of the facilities ensures good living conditions for the salmon, and fish health personnel visit the facilities regularly.

There are still challenges connected to disease, but there is no doubt that the measurers that have been implemented have had a significant effect. Today, we almost never use antibiotics in Norwegian aquaculture farming. In fact, the aquaculture industry has reduced the use of antibiotics by 99% since 1987. The total use of antibiotics in Norway includes 88% for human consumption, 11% for the treatment of agriculture animals, and just 1% for treatment in aquaculture. 

The aquaculture industry has a zero-escape vision, both because the farmed salmon can mix with the wild salmon, but also because escaped fish equal an economic loss for the farmers.

Holes in the nets can appear after work operations or bad weather conditions. The aquaculture industry actively works on preventative measures through focusing on good routines and the use of correct equipment. These measures have worked, and the number of escapes has gone down steadily in the last decade, despite the doubling of production. From 2006 to 2016, the amount of escaped salmon was reduced by 86 %.

Should an accident still occur, it is the farmers’ duty to report it to the Directorate of Fisheries. In addition, the farmers have to attempt to catch the escaped salmon.

In aquaculture farming, there are many fish living in small areas. Therefore, the seafloor around the facilities will be impacted to a certain extent, in the form of feed leftovers and feces from the fish.

This may impact other organisms living around the pens, but there is a lot of ongoing work to limit these impacts. The facilities are placed on locations with good water influxes, and with modern technology, the farmers avoid feeding the salmon more than they can eat. The environmental conditions are closely monitored, and all the farmers must regularly collect and send in samples. In addition, all of the facilities must be left empty for at least two months every two years to let the seafloor recover. Over time, the area will return to its original state.

The measures work – almost 90 % of all the aquaculture facilities along the Norwegian coast have an environmental status marked as “good” or “very good”.